Mellosoftron is a programmable virtual sampler. It can be managed from the midi keyboard, sequencer or any player of the midi files. An editor of patches is built in Mellosoftron which lets the user to edit instruments and to create new ones. Because it uses the same wav format as WaveMaker and MIDInight Express, Mellosoftron fits ideally to creating your own artificial instruments.
It remains only to add AcidWav synthesizer and sound editor and your personal computer becomes a musical studio!
A simple sample synthesizer with a nice interface. It requires for work Pentium-266, sound output goes to the port Direct Sound. The synthesizer uses a comfortable and flexible system of forming the timbres. It is based on the samples (WAVE files), each of which represents one or several adjacent notes. The set of samples is superimposed by an instrument parameters or a program (a patch, a PRG file), containing apportionment of samples on the keyboard and parameters of the envelopes. The instrument may contain some parallel sets of samples and parameters, which traditionally are called the layers. The sounding of each layer is called a voice. Instruments are unified in a map, fixing the setting of instruments to MIDI-channels.
Actually, this hierarchy is typical for the absolute majority of modern apparatus and program synthesizers. The peculiarity of Mellosoftron consists in the fact that the sample files, the program and the maps are located in three groups of catalogues - WAVs, PRGs and MAPs, and each upper lever file contains only links to the files of lower levels. This lets the user to create cross references, when different upper level structures link to the same structures in the lower levels, saving the disk space. At the same time, the banks of instruments containing hundreds of files are less convenient for supporting than the single file banks.
The synthesizer panel has 16 regions of settings of the instruments (the pads), each of them allows the user to choose a necessary instrument
from the PRG-file, to fix for it a MIDI-channel and turn on or off the resonance filter. During the loading of a map from the MAP file one sets all 16 channels at the same time. Three coordinate windows - Volume/Pan, Modulation/Bend, Resonance/Cutoff - allows the user to manage the levels, modulation and the chosen channel filter with the help of the mouse. In case of the presence in the system of the virtual MIDI-cable driver, one can manage the synthesizer through the midi channel. The developers are offering the Mellosoftron inner module of synthesis — Virtual Sampler SDK for embedding in the programs using sample type synthesis of the sound. They offer also a set of tools GM/GS on a separate CD-ROM.
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